I watched Hillary Clinton's concession speech with my two eldest children, Theodore, 10, and Louisa, 8, both her ardent admirers. Toward the end, Clinton said, "And to all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams."

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Theodore sat straight up. He reached for the pause button on the remote. "Why did she say that only to the little girls? What about the boys?" I explained that boys had lots of examples of boys who grew up to be president, but girls didn't. He nodded. Yeah, okay, he got it. But when we watched the rest of the speech, he leaned back on the couch, regarding Clinton from more of a distance, no longer caught up in the moment.

Aggrieved manhood has become a hot topic across the ideological spectrum. There are Bernie and his bros on the left, who spent the months after the election accusing Democrats of ignoring economic issues in favor of pandering to women and minorities. On the right, there are the blue-collar white men of the Rust Belt, who've voted for Democrats in the past but last year pushed the swing states over the edge for Donald Trump.

In a PRRI/Atlantic poll taken shortly before the election, Trump supporters were more likely to agree that "society seems to punish men just for acting like men" and that "society as a whole has become too soft and feminine." A study published in Harvard Business Review last fall showed that, among Republican men, the segment who believe men face "a great deal" or "a lot" of discrimination has doubled since 2012, to near 20 percent. The more marginalized the men felt, the more negatively they rated Clinton.

Though Sanders and Trump are separated by a vast policy gulf, they seem to agree on at least one point: The women's movement is an impediment. Trumpers are explicitly hostile to key parts of the feminist agenda, while the Sanders contingent sees feminism as a distraction from what really matters.

The big head-scratcher of all this, however, is that it flies in the face of mountains of evidence that gender equality is one of the most effective ways to lift the fortunes of not only working-class men but the entire country. In its recent Power of Parity report, the McKinsey Global Institute, the consulting giant's think tank, estimated that if all states caught up with those that are most advanced in terms of gender parity (as indicated, for example, by women and men working outside the home in comparable numbers, equitable sharing of domestic tasks, and low rates of violence against women and teen pregnancy), annual GDP would jump by $2.1 trillion, 10 percent over projected rates, by 2025. This translates to at least 6 million more "quality jobs" for women in rural and urban, and red and blue states.

Further, things could easily go the other way as the Trump administration makes good on its promises to cut Planned Parenthood funding, rescind the Affordable Care Act and its birth control coverage, and put more restrictions on abortion, all of which would limit women's education and employment opportunities, says Lakshman Achuthan, cofounder of the independent Economic Cycle Research Institute. In fact, he says, "It could very likely lead to a recession."

To be clear, McKinsey's economic models don't take work from men and give it to women; the increases in GDP involve money and jobs we're leaving on the table by failing to achieve gender equality. "This means everybody has an increased standard of living," says Kweilin Ellingrud, a coauthor of the report. If women made more, they'd spend more, pumping money into the economy for others to earn (by, for example, building the houses or selling the groceries they need). The wealth of families would also swell, giving the girls and boys who are part of them brighter futures.

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McKinsey isn't the first group to advance this argument, but it's usually offered as an economic engine for developing nations, not the United States. As Stephen Marche, an essayist and novelist, points out in his thought-provoking new book about gender politics, The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the 21st Century, "Politicians who are considering the role of women in the workplace and in society should recognize that they are asking themselves the following question: How poor do we want to be?"

And yet harnessing the political power of men for a feminist revolution seems like a steep climb. In a Feminist Majority Foundation poll last fall, only 33 percent of men considered themselves feminists. On the up side, 54 percent of male Clinton voters identified as feminists; but only 20 percent of Trump men did. And among millennials—heralded for their alleged enlightenment—sexism has been found, in some instances, to be worse than among older men. A PRRI survey of 18- to 34-year-olds found that only 32 percent of male Democrats identified as feminists, while fewer than half of millennial men in a 2014 Harris Poll reported that they felt comfortable interacting or working directly with a female president, Fortune 500 executive, engineer, or senator. In contrast, a majority of all Americans—and older men—were just fine with female leaders.

"When you call yourself a feminist, you're assuming an identity. Feminism should be a system of principles and actions rather than a label or a brand."

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When I asked feminist scholar and journalist Susan Faludi—the author of both Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man—why otherwise progressive men don't embrace feminism, she wondered if part of the problem was the word itself. "There's no equivalent word for someone who supports civil rights, for example," she says. "When you call yourself a feminist, you're assuming an identity. Feminism should be a system of principles and actions rather than a label or a brand, because that gives you the opportunity to hang that brand with all kinds of ugly tinsel." Like, for instance, the canard that feminists hate men. Although Faludi hastened to add that she wasn't counseling against labeling oneself a feminist, she hoped people would start to think of it as a belief system centered on a "larger collective good."

Tommy Harragan

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Marche, who appears to be a feminist—he's written a book pressing for women's empowerment, after all—refuses to identify as such, largely for the reasons Faludi cited: If feminism means women are socially, legally, politically, and economically equal, Marche tells me, then "feminism means 'women are people.' I don't consider that an ism. If you don't believe that, something is wrong with you. 'Women are real people' is a truth, like 'the Earth is a planet.' To say that I espouse it just seems absurd to me. It's like saying 'I'm a gravity-ist.'"

Faludi pointed me to the work of author bell hooks for deeper insight into what might turn off some progressives about feminism. The movement's stated goal is to make women equal to men, but that glides over the reality that "men are not equals in a white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal class structure," as hooks wrote roughly three decades ago. So "which men do women want to be equal to?" Poorer women, particularly nonwhites, "know that many males in their social groups are exploited and oppressed.… They would not deem it liberatory to share their social status."

Though "white male privilege" became a catchphrase last year, some white men are obviously more privileged than others. A recent report from ECRI found that, though urbanites and racial minorities have gained jobs since the recession, white, mostly rural Americans have lost 6.5 million. (Overall, whites still outpace minorities financially.) Because the forces responsible for this economic deterioration—technology, globalization, and "Wall Street greed"—are "largely invisible," Faludi says, dispossessed white men may scapegoat women and minorities, who indeed hold more positions of power than they used to in previous generations, but they still don't hold more power overall.

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A central thesis of Marche's Unmade Bed is that the social changes already underway—women's entrance into the workforce, academic accomplishments, and reduced reliance on men for income and protection—have led to unprecedented gender anxiety. And he sees grotesque gender displays in pop culture and politics—everything from violent porn to the rank misogyny of the alt-right—as symptoms of that unease.

Faludi adds our new president to the list of symptoms. "Trump's appeal is being a bully boy and having control over women. He's held himself out as representing the traditional man, but he belongs to the ornamental realm of TV and getting your brand out," she says, which ironically "represents one of the greatest threats to traditional manhood: that you can't prove your manhood by doing worthy things. You have to play a man on TV; he's the new click-bait man."

Recruiting men to join the fight for gender equity will probably require some femsplaining.

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Although the idea may strike beaten-down feminists as adding insult to injury—once again making it women's job to convince men of our humanity—recruiting men to join the fight for gender equity will probably require some femsplaining. For instance, while the economic case for gender equality is incontrovertible, when I was covering Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state, I noticed that male journalists rarely volunteered to serve as the pool reporter for speeches addressing female economic empowerment. They seemed to file the subject under "Not Real News" or "Doesn't Concern Me." Some of this may have been about the exigencies of news making for a wire service, but the women on the State Department beat showed more interest in hearing the secretary out, even when they weren't likely to file a story about it.

Perhaps surprisingly, Marche, who's Canadian, speculates that Trump might force Americans to process inequality more swiftly. "In Canada, we had Rob Ford [the late Toronto mayor notorious for misogyny, racism, homophobia, and crack addiction], then we all got together, left and right, and we voted for [Prime Minister] Justin Trudeau," a progressive who openly embraces equality between the sexes and has made a point of putting an equal number of women and men in his cabinet, a first for the country.

Marche would like to see feminism rebranded altogether. "We need a theory and political practice of gender that is about men and women together. Feminism, as a term, simply doesn't apply," he says. "Is a world where any thinking about gender starts with women necessarily the right approach? I'm not sure that's good for women. And I know it's not good for men."

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